State officials aim to counter worries over election integrity

Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2006

The mobile outreach effort, dubbed the Maryland Election Integrity Program, came to Southern Maryland last week highlighting security measures at the polls.

Officials stressed that the controversy surrounding early voting, which the Maryland Court of Appeals struck down Aug. 25, and recurring questions about the accuracy of touch-screen voting machines did not trigger the voter education drive.

‘‘Early voting is a small piece of the puzzle ... The touch-screen [machines are] a small piece of the puzzle,” said Mary Heath of the state elections board. ‘‘It’s talking about all the things that our elections officials do to prepare.”

The effort is designed to soothe worries of a repeat of the protracted 2000 presidential election in Florida, which saw officials pore over punch card ballots for weeks before several legal appeals were filed and a winner was determined. ‘‘After the 2000 [presidential] election in the United States, everyone went back and said, ‘We cannot be the next Florida. We cannot fall into a situation where we don’t know who won for three weeks. We have to develop a system that’s going to be cutting edge,’” said Zach Messitte, a political scientist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Enter the touch-screen polling machines, which will be used statewide this fall. But they have given birth to new fears that there is no paper trail to verify the electronic ballots and that they are easy targets for computer hackers.

Both Democrats and Republicans have expressed apprehension about the new process, but state election officials maintain that the machines are secure.

A Johns Hopkins University computer scientist, however, released a report in 2003, after the machines were purchased, that described the machines as vulnerable to fraud. Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) and a Takoma Park-based watchdog group have echoed those sentiments.

‘‘Since the last election, there have been numerous independent studies of the machines that have shown even more vulnerabilities,” said Bob Ferraro, co-founder of TrueVoteMD, which is pushing for a paper trail.

In June, the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law issued a report warning of security lapses in the most commonly used electronic voting machines. ‘‘All three voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections,” the report said. Simple software viruses could alter an election’s outcome, it added.

Ferraro said there is also a concern that if electronic machines break down, previously recorded votes could not be retrieved. With no paper trail, there is no way to perform a manual recount.

E-mail Alan Brody at abrody@somdnews.com. Staff writer Erica Mitrano contributed to this report.